International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

IJURR Virtual Issues

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research invites you to read the following Virtual Issues, compiled by the Journal's editorial team:

LOS ANGELES
Roger Keil, York University, Canada
IJURR Advisory Board
April 2013

LATIN AMERICAN CITIES
Jeremy Seekings, University of Cape Town, South Africa
IJURR Advisory Board
August 2012

NEW YORK CITY
Matthew Gandy, University College London, UK
IJURR Editorial Board
February 2012

CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP IN URBAN SOCIOLOGY
Jeremy Seekings, University of Cape Town, South Africa
IJURR Advisory Board
August 2011

DUTCH CITIES
Talja Blokland, Institut fur Sozialwissenschaften Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany
IJURR Reviews Editor
June 2011

Roger Keil, York University, Canada
IJURR Advisory Board
April 2013

Pictures Left to right: Posters in Compton, known to the world as the birth-place of ‘gangsta rap’; Pink’s Hot Dogs stand at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California (R. Keil 2011) and aerial photograph flying into Los Angeles (R. Keil 2012)

Long in the shadow of its continental rivals New York and Chicago, and by far not as extensive an object of urban studies as Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta or the legendary New Haven, Connecticut, Los Angeles has, during the last generation, come into its own as a site for and place of origin of important research on the city.

Until Mike Davis’s game changing City of Quartz (1990), the truly important works of critical urban research on Los Angeles (amongst many technical and descriptive studies) could be counted on one hand. The defining study, flawed as it was, remained for many decades Anton Wagner’s Los Angeles: Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, (1935). Two magnificent pieces of work that could not be more different from each other marked a new era of L.A. studies with path-breaking new perspectives on the burgeoning Southern California metropolis, first in 1967, Robert Fogelson’s The Fragmented Metropolis and shortly after in 1971, Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Just before the publication of Davis’s masterwork, Edward Soja revolutionized the way geographers and urban scholars would look at space, time and the city in his Postmodern Geographies (1989). That Soja’s venture into poststructuralism and postmodernism started (and ended) in Los Angeles was no accident. For the next two and a half decades a rich field of urban research was opened up in Southern California that changed the way we see the urban, and the world. These seminal works were followed, in the 1990s and 2000s by an impressive wave of new scholarship that put Los Angeles on the global map of urban studies in monographs, edited volumes and countless journal articles too many to mention in this brief review. As Los Angeles grew in significance as the “Capital of the Pacific Rim”, a “Los Angeles School” of urban and regional research claimed to revolutionize urban research fundamentally once and for all.

When IJURR was founded in the 1970s, Los Angeles was just beginning to experience the crisis that would define the final quarter of the 20th century, characterized by the deindustrialization of what once used to be one of the most extensive Fordist production complexes and the almost complete transformation into a neo-industrial, post-Fordist dreamscape of sweatshops, flexible production systems and a seemingly unending flow of immigrant capital and labour. The new arrangements were punctured by the Rebellion of April 1992 which marked yet another turning point in the history of the city and the region. For some, those defining decades in Los Angeles history and geography heralded more than just local events: A new type of city and a new type of urban studies were supposedly in the making that made L.A. the model of many if not most urban places everywhere.

IJURR, while not the natural journal to host the upheavals of the cultural, linguistic, poststructural and spatial turns that originated partly in Los Angeles as city and intellectual place, did provide a platform for some of the major debates that sprang from that period. Los Angeles has been in IJURR from the beginning to the current time. In the brief selection below, we have the pleasure to unearth a few of the classical papers published in our journal and present them as a joint collection for the attendants of this year’s AAG meetings and beyond.

The selection below comes from a longer list of publications in IJURR that had Los Angeles as origin or subject. I had to make some hard choices given the limits to this format of a digital edition. In the end, I am presenting three categories of papers from more than 30 years of journal output.

In the first group of papers, we find the classics. These are examples of the signal effects coming from Los Angeles that ignited a new generation of urban scholars to look beyond the national, Fordist models of urbanization and to explore new categories of city formation. World or global city research arguably has its origin in the seminal paper by Friedmann and Wolff. Scott’s piece on flexible production systems was crucial for our understanding of restructured urban and regional economic geographies after Fordism. Much of that development and of that understanding had its origin in Southern California. Don Parson’s two papers present work by one of Southern California’s most unique, independent and radical thinkers. Mapping the mid- and end of century alike, they grapple with the main categories of urban life in the city’s restructuring. Finally, Nicholls’s reflective article on the Los Angeles School summarizes some of the core intellectual currents that defined L.A. during the past generation.

The second category deals with politics and movements. To highlight work in this area is a bit indulgent as I have worked on these matters myself. But I do believe that the selections here give a good impression of the significance of Los Angeles, considered by some not so profoundly political as other American cities, as a tremendously important site of action and policy in the urban realm. The classical studies by Haas and Heskin, and Shearer and the more current piece by Nicholls examine pathbreaking movements in the history of US progressive neighbourhood, labour and urban politics. The contributions by Boudreau and Keil warn against a simplistic celebration of local democracy in a context set by the legacy of the Lakewood plan, political segregation and Proposition 13.

Our final five papers deal with social structures, diversity, marginality and privilege. They are also the most recent set of papers with the first one marking the analysis of the conditions preceding the Rebellion of 1992 by Johnson, Farrell and Oliver. Ivan Light’s paper on immigrant place entrepreneurs stands for, but also stands out of, a strong tradition of scholarship published in IJURR that has dealt with economic and social aspects of immigration to Los Angeles. The papers by Reese, Deverteuil, Thach and by Marr go the core of the city and its perennial problems of marginality, homelessness and poverty. The final selection features current work by LeGoix and Vesellinov on the phenomenon of gated communities. This last section also nicely demonstrates the wide disciplinary and methodological spectrum of high quality research published in IJURR on Los Angeles: from social geography, to sociology, critical anthropology and econometrics. There is something for everyone in IJURR’s Los Angeles. And although Soja (1989:222), in likening it to Borges’s Aleph, calls Los Angeles “exceedingly tough-to-track, peculiarly resistant to conventional description”, many people have tried and keep trying to blaze new trails in making sense of Los Angeles. IJURR is pleased to have provided one possible and relevant place for this work to appear.

Roger Keil is a former co-editor of IJURR and the author of Los Angeles: Globalization, Urbanization and Social Struggles. Chichester: Wiley, 1998.

Foundations/Context

World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action
J. Friedmann and G. Wolff (1982)

The development of redevelopment: public housing and urban renewal in Los Angeles
D. Parson (1982)

Flexible Production Systems and Regional Development: The Rise of New Industrial Spaces in North America and Western Europe
A. Scott (1988)

The Search for a Centre: the Recomposition of Race, Class and Space in Los Angeles
D. Parson (1993)

The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City
W. J. Nicholls (2011)

Politics and Movements

Community struggles in Los Angeles
G. Haas and A. D. Heskin (1981)

Citizen Participation in Local Government: The Case of Santa Monica, California
D. Shearer (1984)

Governance Restructuring in Los Angeles and Toronto: Amalgamation or Secession
R. Keil (2000)

Questioning the use of 'local democracy' as a discursive strategy for political mobilization in Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto
J.-A. Boudreau (2003)

Forging a ‘new’ organizational infrastructure for Los Angeles’ progressive community
W. J. Nicholls (2003)

Social Structures, Diversity, Marginality, Privilege

Seeds of the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992
J. H. Johnson, W. C. Farrell and M. L. Oliver (1993)

Immigrant Place Entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, 1970-99
I. Light (2002)

‘Weak-Center’ Gentrification and the Contradictions of Containment: Deconcentrating Poverty in Downtown Los Angeles
E. Reese, G. Deverteuil and L. Thach (2010)

Pathways out of Homelessness in Los Angeles and Tokyo: Multilevel Contexts of Limited Mobility amid Advanced Urban Marginality
M. D. Marr (2012)

Gated Communities and House Prices: Suburban Change in Southern California, 1980–2008
R. L. Goix and E. Vesselinov (2013)

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Jeremy Seekings, University of Cape Town, South Africa
IJURR Advisory Board
August 2012

Pictures Left to Right: Rua do Catete, Rio de Janeiro (2009), Av. Vinte e Três de Maio junction, Sao Paulo (2009) (Yuri Kazepov) and Complejo Soldati, Buenos Aires (2006) (Ryan Centner)

Over the past ten years IJURR has sought to expand its coverage of Latin America cities, developing a critical urban scholarship that does not simply apply North American or European urban and regional theory to the region, but rather views Latin American cities on their own terms and uses their experiences to contribute to a more thoroughly global understanding of urban and regional phenomena. Inevitably, IJURR’s track record has been uneven, and much more can and needs to be done. This collection of articles published in IJURR reveals both the strengths and the current limits of the journal’s engagement with cities in the Southern Cone of Latin America.

Latin American cities have long been both global and massive. Through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, immigrants from Southern Europe (and elsewhere) arrived in huge numbers in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo and Santiago, whilst other Brazilian cities had large populations of former slaves brought from Africa. The population of Buenos Aires reached one million in 1905. Within ten years Rio de Janeiro’s population had also reached one million by 1913, by which time the population of Buenos Aires was rising towards 2 million. The political, economic and social lives of these cities were forged in an era of globalization.

Massive rural-to-urban migration in the twentieth century meant that Latin American cities remained among the world’s largest. Mexico City and São Paulo now have populations of more than 20 million people, and Rio and Buenos Aires have populations of more than 10 million. Bogota, Lima and even Santiago are creeping towards 10 million. About seventy cities in a total of twenty-one countries have populations of more than 1 million. And a new era of globalization has exposed Latin American cities to international flows of capital, people and ideas.

The papers in this virtual issue reflect IJURR’s concern with social justice and especially the politics and distributional consequences of public policies. Most of the Southern Cone has been governed by at the national level by presidents and parties from the left or centre-left: Concertación in Chile, the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, Social Democratic Party) and Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Worker’s Party) in Brazil, the Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union) and the Peronist Partido Justicialista in Argentina, and the Frente Amplio (or Broad Front) in Uruguay. The major cities of the region have generally been the strongholds of left and centre-left parties. These governments have pursued policies that entail a mix of democratic innovation, state intervention and market liberalisation. Understanding this mix is a major challenge to critical urban scholars of the region.

Kanai and Ortega-Alcazar examine how the distributional consequences of culture-led urban regeneration in cases from Buenos Aires and Mexico City depended on political circumstances as much as fiscal constraints. Van Gelder probes how and why tenure security really affects households in poor neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires, and shows that both tenure legality and perceived security are closely correlated with households’ investments in improving their housing, but apparently not because legality improves access to credit, as is often assumed. Tironi, analysing survey data, argues that the quality of community is higher in public housing villas built by the center-left Concertación governments in Chile since 1990 than in the public housing poblaciones built in the 1960s. In his account, the reduction in material poverty has not been achieved at the expense of social cohesion. Posner contests this finding, arguing that post-1990 housing policies exacerbated social stratification and undermined social cohesion. Lopez-Morales examines the effects of the liberalisation of building regulations on gentrification and social housing in Santiago. Salcedo and Torres’s ethnographic research in a poor walled and gated neighbourhood in Santiago suggests that such neighbourhoods are not isolated enclaves. Auyero shows how residents of slums in Buenos Aires experience deepening marginalization. Centner examines the diversity of forms of belonging to the city in Buenos Aires, and identifies distinct forms of citizenship. Avritzer and Hernandez-Medina contribute to the substantial literature on Orçamento Participativo (OP, i.e. participatory budgeting) in Brazilian cities. Rolnik examines some of the limits to policy reform in Brazil, and Fernandes and Novy document the muted effects of the international financial crisis on Brazil.

Most of these papers were written in explicit engagement with urban theory originating in the global North, testing the value of standard explanations in the case of one or other city in the region. Goldfrank and Schrank provide a broad, comparative analysis of the political economy of municipal government. Their paper was published in the “Urban Worlds” section of IJURR. This section is dedicated to papers that step back from case-studies and provide a broader, critical perspective on a topic or literature. IJURR especially welcomes submissions for the “Urban Worlds” section that draw on research on diverse Latin American towns and cities to challenge head-on theories derived from the global North. Topics as varied as urban regime theory, social cohesion, neoliberalism and democracy are all ones where cities across the global South can pose fundamental challenges to theories from the global North. We look forward to a time when our urban theory is derived as much from studies rooted in Buenos Aires (or Cordoba or Mendoza) as in ones rooted in Chicago or Los Angeles.

Much of the best work on Latin America is, of course, done by scholars whose native language is either Spanish or Portuguese. IJURR makes a special effort to accommodate scholars for whom English is a second or third language. Indeed, neither of IJURR’s current editors is a native English speaker. IJURR publishes in English, but it can usually review submissions written in Spanish and Portuguese, and has a small budget for translating into English papers that are accepted for publication. More generally, IJURR’s copy-editors help to ensure a high quality of English in published papers. Our reviewers are asked to judge papers on the quality of the research and the analysis, and not on whether the English is perfect.

At present the IJURR Editorial Board has one member from Latin America: Raquel Rolnik (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil). Beatriz Jaguaribe (of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Brown University, Providence, USA) are Corresponding Editors. Marcus Melo (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil) recently retired from the IJURR Editorial Board, and is now a member of the journal’s Advisory Board.

This Virtual Issue of IJURR for RC21 Buenos Aires conference on “Social Justice and Democratization”, focuses on Cities in the Southern Cone of Latin America. It showcases IJURR’s publication of articles on cities in Argentina and Chile, plus four very topical papers on Brazil.

Argentina:
The Prospects for Progressive Culture-Led Urban Regeneration in Latin America: Cases from Mexico City and Buenos Aires
Kanai and Ortega-Alcazar

Legal Tenure Security, Perceived Tenure Security and Housing Improvement in Buenos Aires: An Attempt towards Integration
Van Gelder

Microcitizenships: Fractious Forms of Urban Belonging after Argentine Neoliberalism
Ryan Centner

'This is a lot like the Bronx, isn’t it?’ Lived experiences of marginality in an Argentine slum
Javier Auyero

Chile:
Targeted Assistance and Social Capital: Housing Policy in Chile's Neoliberal Democracy
Paul W. Posner

The Lost Community? Public Housing and Social Capital in Santiago de Chile, 1985–2001
Manuel Tironi

Gentrification by Ground Rent Dispossession: The Shadows Cast by Large-Scale Urban Renewal in Santiago de Chile
Ernesto Lopez-Morales

Gated Communities in Santiago: Wall or Frontier?
Rodrigo Salcedo and AlvaroTorres

Brazil:
Democracy on the Edge: Limits and Possibilities in the Implementation of an Urban Reform Agenda in Brazil
Raquel Rolnik

Reflections on the Unique Response of Brazil to the Financial Crisis and its Urban Impact Avritzer on participation in participatory budgeting in Brazil
Ana Christina Fernandes and Andreas Novy

Social Inclusion through Participation: the Case of the Participatory Budget in São Paulo
Esther Hernandez-Medina

New Public Spheres in Brazil: Local Democracy and Deliberative Politics
Leonardo Avritzer

Comparative:
Municipal Neoliberalism and Municipal Socialism: Urban Political Economy in Latin America
Benjamin Goldfrank and Andrew Schrank

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Matthew Gandy, University College London, UK
IJURR Editorial Board
February 2012

Central Park, 1996; Bear Garden, Brooklyn, 1996; Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2000 (photos by Matthew Gandy)

Many of the key debates in urban research over the last thirty years have occurred in and through New York City. A range of key figures in the analysis of capitalist urbanization have published their research on New York City in the pages of this journal including Robert Beauregard, Susan Fainstein, John Friedmann, Loretta Lees, Ann Markusen, Margit Mayer, Peter Marcuse, Harvey Molotch, Neil Smith, Sharon Zukin and many others.

We can differentiate between two main bodies of work in relation to New York City: firstly, the role of the city as an intellectual arena through which key theoretical ideas have been explored and elaborated; and secondly, those works that focus on the city itself for the analysis of specific manifestations of urban transformation. If we consider the ‘thinking space’ of the city it is clear that the role of New York as an inspiration for thought and also a focus for analysis are often interrelated so we cannot easily disentangle the theoretical and empirical dimensions to urban scholarship. Although, we cannot refer to a ‘New York School’ in quite the same way as the LA School of the 1990s — exemplified by the work of Ed Soja, Allen J. Scott and others — or even the Venice School of the 1970s — with the distinctive neo-Marxian architectonic discourse of Massimo Cacciari and Manfredo Tafuri — there is nonetheless a powerful skein of individual and institutional connections that places the city at the centre of a series of critical debates. There has been, through the work of Peter Marcuse, Neil Smith and others, a deep dedication to exploring aspects of social injustice in New York City as a means to build a powerful body of empirically grounded theoretical work. A set of conceptual tools and vantage points have emerged from the city which remain pivotal to socially engaged urban research.

Critical areas of scholarship on New York City addressed in IJURR include migration, labour markets and the incidence of urban poverty; the effects of fiscal crisis on patterns of urban government and public service provision; housing and ghetto formation; gentrification and class displacement; the garment industry and processes of industrial change; the rise of art districts and the power of cultural capital; and more recently, the city as a focal point for critical security discourses and geopolitical agendas.

In selecting ten articles for this IJURR virtual issue (from more than 40 possibilities) I have sought a balance between past and present, placing some ‘classic’ articles alongside a few less known contributions. There comes a certain point where the journal itself becomes part of the discourse in question: essays may link in unexpected ways or novel insights may subsequently become central elements in urban debate. I hope that this initial selection will provoke further reading and reflection and perhaps even the writing of new articles that carry these debates forward.

The Reassertion of Economics: 1990s Gentrification in the Lower East Side
Neil Smith and James Defilippis

Is the institutionalization of urban movements inevitable? A comparison of the opportunities for sustained squatting in New York City and Amsterdam
Hans Pruijt

Dealing with Urban Terror: Heritages of Control, Varieties of Intervention, Strategies of Research
Harvey Molotch and Noah Mcclain

The Ascendance of New York Fashion
Norma M. Rantisi

Loft living as ‘historic compromise’ in the urban core: the New York experience
Sharon Zukin

Gimme shelter: self-help housing struggles within and against the state in New York City and West Berlin
Steven Katz and Margit Mayer

‘Dual city’: a muddy metaphor for a quartered city
Peter Marcuse

Economics, politics and development policy: the convergence of New York and London
Susan S. Fainstein

Sweatshop Workers and Domestic Ideologies: Dominican Women in New York’s Apparel Industry
Patricia R. Pessar

Changing Art: SoHo, Chelsea and the Dynamic Geography of Galleries in New York City
Harvey Molotch and Mark Treskon

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Jeremy Seekings, University of Cape Town, South Africa
IJURR Advisory Board
August 2011

These classic and recent articles published in IJURR provide a flavour of the kind of critical urban scholarship associated with the journal. IJURR is a forum for scholarship from a variety of disciplines, but we are especially proud of our long association with RC21 (Urban and Regional Development) of the International Sociology Association.

IJURR was founded in 1977 by many of the scholars who had formed RC21 a few years earlier, including Ray Pahl, Enzo Mingione, Edmond Preteceille, Manuel Castells, Chris Pickvance, Frances Fox Piven and Michael Harloe. For 35 years, IJURR has pioneered many of the key debates in urban sociology and urban studies more generally. Led by a truly multi-national (and multilingual) editorial team, IJURR promotes the critical study of the city and urban life, across North America, Europe and the ‘global South’. For further information on IJURR, its associated book series (Studies in Urban and Social Change) and the charitable Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS), see our website www.ijurr.org.

The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research: An Editorial Statement
Jeremy Seekings and Roger Keil

Beyond housing classes
Peter Saunders

Postfordism in question
Andrew Sayer

Les conditions sociales d'emergence des mouvements sociaux urbains
Manuel Castells

The Infrastructural Limits to Growth: Rethinking the Urban Growth Machine in Times of Fiscal Crisis
L. Owen Kirkpatrick and Michael Peter Smith

Speculative Urbanism and the Making of the Next World City
Michael Goldman

Social Mix Policies in Paris: Discourses, Policies and Social Effects
Marie-Hélène Bacqué, Yankel Fijalkow, Lydie Launay and Stéphanie Vermeersch

The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City
Walter J. Nicholls

Exclusionary Policies are Not Just about the ‘Neoliberal City’: A Critique of Theories of Urban Revanchism and the Case of Rotterdam
Gwen Van Eijk

Governing Ourselves: Citizen Participation and Governance in Barcelona and Manchester
Georgina Blakeley

Separate and Unequal: The Consumption of Public Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Joshua M. Akers

Recreative City: Amsterdam, Vehicular Ideas and the Adaptive Spaces of Creativity Policy
Jamie Peck

When Life Itself is War: On the Urbanization of Military and Security Doctrine
Stephen Graham

Securing the Majority: Living through Uncertainty in Jakarta
Abdoumaliq Simone and Vyjayanthi Rao

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Talja Blokland, Institut fur Sozialwissenschaften Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany
IJURR Reviews Editor
June 2011

Graffiti in an Amsterdam Doorway (street artist C215, photo courtesy of Peter Bardell)

This ‘virtual’ issue of IJURR brings together thirteen articles on Dutch cities, published in print in the journal since 2001 or published online (in ‘EarlyView’) and awaiting publication in print. This set of articles explores some of the ways in which Dutch cities are distinctive, especially in terms of the design, struggles over, and effects of urban policy. The collection is intended to enable scholars who are not specialists on the Netherlands to use Dutch cases to contribute to theorizing the interconnections between state, public policy and public participation. Here, Dutch cities have a particularly strong tradition. As this introduction argues, the articles provide essential insights into the workings and shortcomings of Dutch (although primarily Amsterdam) urban policies, and clearly show how the instrumental rationality of such policies have come to prevail, while substantial rational discussions - or urban politics rather than urban policy - have become of relatively minor importance. This, in combination with a focus on urban policy rather than urbanism in current Dutch urban studies, leave some of the remarkable developments within the fully urbanized Dutch society - in particular the current growth in various forms of exclusionary practices, including those based on race and ethnicity - relatively open for an important new research agenda.

Introduction
Talja Blokland

Recreative City: Amsterdam, vehicular ideas, and the adaptive spaces of creative policy
Jamie Peck

Partnerships in Urban Restructuring: Building Long-term Relationships or a Pragmatic Managerial Tool? The Dutch Experience
Anita Kokx

Exclusionary Policies are Not Just about the ‘Neoliberal City’: A Critique of Theories of Urban Revanchism and the Case of Rotterdam
Gwen Van Eijk
(2010)

Amsterdam in Crisis: How the (Local) State Buffers and Suffers
Sako Musterd and Ewald Engelen
(2010)

Mega-projects in New York, London and Amsterdam
Susan S. Fainstein
(2008)

Citizen Participation in a Mediated Age: Neighbourhood Governance in The Netherlands
Justus Uitermark and Jan Willem Duyvendak
(2008)

Variations in immigrant incorporation in the neighborhoods of Amsterdam
John Logan
(2006)

Reinventing multiculturalism: Urban citizenship and the negotiation of ethnic diversity in Amsterdam
Justus Uitermark, Ugo Rossi and Henk van Houtum
(2005)

Dutch housing allowances: Social housing at risk
Hugo Priemus
(2004)

Is the institutionalization of urban movements inevitable? A comparison of the opportunities for sustained squatting in New York City and Amsterdam
Hans Pruijt
(2003)

The co-optation of squatters in Amsterdam and the emergence of a movement meritocracy: a critical reply to Pruijt
Justus Uitermark
(2004)

Squatters in the creative city: rejoinder to Justus Uitermark
Hans Pruijt
(2004)

Bricks, mortar, memories: neighbourhood and networks in collective arts of remembering
Talja Blokland
(2001)

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